TPR to begin AE spot checks on Birmingham employers

The Pensions Regulator (TPR) is to begin carrying out spot checks in Birmingham to ensure employers are complying with their automatic enrolment duties.

From next week, inspection teams will visit dozens of businesses in and around the city to check that qualifying staff are being given the workplace pensions they are entitled to.

The move is part of a nationwide enforcement campaign which began in London in April to ensure employers are meeting their automatic enrolment duties correctly.

Birmingham is to become the third area to be the focus of the short-notice inspections. TPR carried out checks in Greater Manchester earlier this month.

The checks will also help TPR understand whether employers are facing any unnecessary challenges that we can help them with, such as by improving our systems.

But they will also highlight employers who have not taken the required steps to become or remain compliant, paving the way for enforcement action.

Darren Ryder, TPR’s Acting Director of Automatic Enrolment, said:

“The vast majority of employers become compliant ahead of their deadline but these visits help us to identify why some have not, so we can take action where we need to.

“Every employer has workplace pension duties and we are determined that every worker gets the pension they are entitled to.

“Automatic enrolment is not an option, it’s the law. Where we find employers are not complying with the law, we will use our powers to make them comply.”

More than 500,000 employers across the UK have met their automatic enrolment duties, with nearly eight million workers given workplace pensions as a result. New data to the end of April 2017 reveals that more than 6,000 employers in Birmingham have met their automatic enrolment duties and as a result, 150,000 members of staff in the city have signed up for workplace pensions to date.

Visits will begin in other towns and cities across the UK in the following weeks.

Editor's notes

Our most recent quarterly automatic enrolment compliance and enforcement bulletin showed that in the first three months of 2017, TPR issued a total of 4,673 fixed penalty notices and 1,043 escalating penalty notices.

Employers are notified about an inspection a matter of days in advance of our visit. Those being visited include organisations that we suspect may not be compliant or who we believe are at risk of becoming non-compliant in the future.

TPR is the regulator of work-based pension schemes in the UK. Our statutory objectives are: to protect members’ benefits; to reduce the risk of calls on the Pension Protection Fund (PPF); to promote, and to improve understanding of, the good administration of work-based pension schemes; to maximise employer compliance with automatic enrolment duties; and to minimise any adverse impact on the sustainable growth of an employer (in relation to the exercise of TPR’s functions under Part 3 of the Pensions Act 2004 only).